When I left for Rice the previous fall, my parents left as well,
moving from Maryland (our home of thirteen years or so) to Augusta,
Maine.

Despite being the seat of state government, Augusta is a tiny, tiny
town. (It is utterly dwarfed by its southern cousin, Portland.) I
had spent a few days there for the Thanksgiving break, but the winter
recess was my first real sojourn in the area.

I didn’t know anyone in town, of course, and had precious little to
keep me occupied. I took to staying up very late, in a room on the
sub-ground floor (the lot sloped down away from the street out front),
nominally “Dan’s room” but more of a computer room and office.

I would sit at my mom’s drafting table, perched on a high stool,
smudging graphite and ink all over my hands, late into the cold Maine
night. I tried desperately to reconnect the wires and terminals in my
brain that had allowed me to part with my pride and perfectionism long
enough to create Captain Jim in high
school; I had so many ideas, so many new stories to tell, so many new
shapes and forms to commit to paper. I just wanted to
unclench and let it all escape from the electrons in my brain, to be
reborn as carbon atoms lodged in an angry sea of bleached cellulose fibers. I
always found this bizarre process came more readily in the middle of the
night.

The night in Maine is as quiet as it is cold, however. A dry,
bony silence wrapped the house that wasn’t home, crushing my ears like
wind chill. And so I turned on the radio.

It’s tough to find good radio in the Augusta market; stations
are predominantly
country and religious. I found myself returning to two stations:
WCYI/WCYY broadcasting out of
Lewiston-Auburn, and WMEH,
Maine Public Radio. MPR (not to be confused with Minnesota Public
Radio, also excellent of course) carried some NPR programs, some PRI
programming, and classical music.

And, in the middle of the night, when college freshmen may be trying
desperately to keep themselves awake (not, perhaps, yet having discovered the
sweet taste of coffee) to try to seize the slow rhythm of those precious alpha
brain waves, harnessing their mysterious power for both good and evil,
before sleep inevitably conquers all … that is when Hearts of Space came
on.

❧ ❧ ❧

And all this flooded
to mind at a
quarter to Midnight on a Saturday night. I quickly turned on KUHF, just in time to catch just the last few
minutes of tonight’s HOS program.

[17:33]<dsandler> What, because you’ve been working on the same damnproject for two years, and despite the fact that you hate it, you feel
instinctively compelled to defend it, mostly to defend all the hours of
your life that are gone down that hole?

Bush said: “God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and
then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am
determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I
will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus
on them.”